Past attempts to render the Web as a 3-D space have fallen flat. Tim Bray,
co-inventor of XML, blames virtual visionaries who, he says, expected the
masses to do the heavy lifting by installing viewer software, learning
new interfaces, and rewriting code.

Bray's answer: Antarcti.ca Systems, a Canadian company that will do the
grunt work of converting clients' Web sites from HTML to XML with the latest
PC version of Internet Explorer. The company's demo project uses the continent
of Antarctica as a visual metaphor for a map of more than 2 million Web
sites cataloged by the Open Directory Project. Directory categories appear
as geographic regions that vary in size according to how much content they
contain. Within each region, sites and documents are depicted
as clickable map points, using traditional cartographic symbols.